Factory Farming in the Developing World

Factory Farming in the Developing World

In some critical respects, this is not progress at
all.

Walking through Bobby Inocencio's farm in the hills of
Rizal province in the Philippines is like taking a step back to a simpler time.
Hundreds of chickens (a cross between native Filipino chickens and a French
breed) roam around freely in large, fenced pens. They peck at various
indigenous plants, they eat bugs, and they fertilize the soil, just as
domesticated chickens have for ages.

The
scene may be old, but Inocencio's farm is anything but simple. What he has
recreated is a complex and successful system of raising chickens that benefits
small producers, the environment, and even the chickens. Once a "factory
farmer," Inocencio used to raise white chickens for Pure Foods, one of the
biggest companies in the Philippines.

Thousands
of birds were housed in long, enclosed metal sheds that covered his property.
Along with the breed stock and feeds he had to import, Inocencio also found
himself dealing with a lot of imported diseases and was forced to buy expensive
antibiotics to keep the chickens alive long enough to take them to market.
Another trick of the trade Inocencio learned was the use of growth promotants that
decrease the time it takes for chickens to mature.

Eventually
he noticed that fewer and fewer of his neighbors were raising chickens, which
threatened the community's food security by reducing the locally available
supply of chickens and eggs. As the community dissolved and farms (and farming
methods) that had been around for generations went virtually extinct, Inocencio
became convinced that there had to be a different way to raise chickens and
still compete in a rapidly globalizing marketplace. "The business of the white
chicken," he says, "is controlled by the big guys." Not only do small farmers
have to compete with the three big companies that control white chickens in the
Philippines, but they must also contend with pressure from the World Trade Organization
(WTO) to open up trade. In the last two decades the Filipino poultry production
system has transitioned from mainly backyard farms to a huge industry. In the
1980s the country produced 50 million birds annually. Today that figure has
increased some ten-fold. The large poultry producers have benefited from this
population explosion, but average farmers have not. So Inocencio decided to go
forward by going back and reviving village-level poultry enterprises that
supported traditional family farms and rural communities.

Inocencio's
farm and others like it show that the Philippines can support indigenous
livestock production and stand up to the threat of the factory farming methods
now spreading around the world. Since 1997, his Teresa Farms has been raising
free range chickens and teaching other farmers how to do the same. He says that
the way he used to raise chickens, by concentrating so many of them in a small
space, is dangerous. Diseases such as avian flu, leukosis J (avian leukemia),
and Newcastle disease are spread from white chickens to the Filipino native
chicken populations, in some cases infecting eggs before the chicks are even
born. "The white chicken," says Inocencio, "is weak, making the system weak.
And if these chickens are weak, why should we be raising them? Limiting their
genetic base and using breeds that are not adapted to conditions in the
Philippines is like setting up the potential for a potato blight on a global
scale." Now Teresa Farms chickens are no longer kept in long, enclosed sheds,
but roam freely in large tree-covered areas of his farm that he encloses with
recycled fishing nets.

Inocencio's
chickens also don't do drugs. Antibiotics, he says, are not only expensive but
encourage disease. He found the answer to the problem of preventing diseases in
chickens literally in his own back yard. His chickens eat spices and native
plants with antibacterial and other medicinal properties. Chili, for instance,
is mixed in grain to treat respiratory problems, stimulate appetite during heat
stress, de-worm the birds, and to treat Newcastle disease. Native plants
growing on the farm, including ipil-ipil and damong maria, are also used as
low-cost alternatives to antibiotics and other drugs.

There
was a time when most farms in the Philippines, the United States, and
everywhere else functioned much like Bobby Inocencio's. But today the factory
model of raising animals in intensive conditions is spreading around the globe.

A
New Jungle

Meat once occupied a very different dietary place in
most of the world. Beef, pork, and chicken were considered luxuries, and were
eaten on special occasions or to enhance the flavor of other foods. But as
agriculture became more mechanized, so did animal production. In the United
States, livestock raised in the West was herded or transported east to
slaughterhouses and packing mills. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, written almost
a century ago when the United States lacked many food-safety and labor
regulations, described the appalling conditions of slaughterhouses in Chicago
in the early 20th century and was a shocking expose of meat production and the
conditions inflicted on both animals and humans by the industry. Workers were
treated much like animals themselves, forced to labor long hours for very
little pay under dangerous conditions, and with no job security.

If
The Jungle were written today,
however, it might not be set in the American Midwest. Today, developing nations
like the Philippines are becoming the centers of large-scale livestock
production and processing to feed the world's growing appetite for cheap meat
and other animal products. But the problems Sinclair pointed to a century ago,
including hazardous working conditions, unsanitary processing methods, and
environmental contamination, still exist. Many have become even worse. And as
environmental regulations in the European Union and the United States become
stronger, large agribusinesses are moving their animal production operations to
nations with less stringent enforcement of environmental laws.

These
intensive and environmentally destructive production methods are spreading all
over the globe, to Mexico, India, the former Soviet Union, and most rapidly
throughout Asia. Wherever they crop up, they create a web of related food
safety, animal welfare, and environmental problems. Philip Lymbery, campaign
director of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, describes the
growth of industrial animal production this way: Imagine traditional livestock
production as a beach and factory farms as a tide. In the United States, the
tide has completely covered the beach, swallowing up small farms and
concentrating production in the hands of a few large companies. In Taiwan, it
is almost as high. In the Philippines, however, the tide is just hitting the
beach. The industrial, factory-farm methods of raising and slaughtering
animals-methods that were conceived and developed in the United States and
Western Europe-have not yet swept over the Philippines, but they are coming
fast.

An
Appetite for Destruction

Global meat production has increased more than
five-fold since 1950, and factory farming is the fastest growing method of
animal production worldwide. Feedlots are responsible for 43 percent of the
world's beef, and more than half of the world's pork and poultry are raised in
factory farms. Industrialized countries dominate production, but developing
countries are rapidly expanding and intensifying their production systems.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Asia
(including the Philippines) has the fastest developing livestock sector. On the
islands that make up the Philippines, 500 million chickens and 20 million hogs
are slaughtered each year.

Despite
the fact that many health-conscious people in developed nations are choosing to
eat less meat, worldwide meat consumption continues to rise. Consumption is
growing fastest in the developing countries. Two-thirds of the gains in meat
consumption in 2002 were in the developing world, where urbanization, rising
incomes, and globalized trade are changing diets and fueling appetites for meat
and animal products. Because eating meat has been perceived as a measure of
economic and social development, the Philippines and other poor nations are
eager to climb up the animal-protein ladder. People in the Philippines still
eat relatively little meat, but their consumption is growing. As recently as
1995, the average Filipino ate 21 kilograms of meat per year. Since then,
average consumption has soared to almost 30 kilograms per year, although that
is still less than half the amount in Western countries, where per-capita
consumption is 80 kilograms per year.

This
push to increase both production and consumption in the Philippines and other
developing nations is coming from a number of different directions. Since the
end of World War II, agricultural development has been considered a part of the
foreign aid and assistance given to developing nations. The United States and
international development agencies have been leaders in promoting the use of
pesticides, artificial fertilizers, and other chemicals to boost agricultural
production in these countries, often at the expense of the environment.
American corporations like Purina Mills and Tyson Foods are also opening up
feed mills and farms so they can expand business in the Philippines.

But
Filipinos are also part of the push to industrialize agriculture. "This is not
an idea only coming from the West," says Dr. Abe Agulto, president of the
Philippine Society for the Protection of Animals, "but also coming from us."
Meat equals wealth in much of the world and many Filipino businesspeople have
taken up largescale livestock production to supply the growing demand for meat.
But small farmers don't get much financial support in the Philippines. It's
not farms like Bobby Inocencio's that
are likely to get government assistance, but the big production facilities that
can crank out thousands of eggs, chicks, or piglets a year.

The
world's growing appetite for meat is not without its consequences, however. One
of the first indications that meat production can be hazardous arises long
before animals ever reach the slaughterhouse. Mountains of smelly and toxic
manure are created by the billions of animals raised for human consumption in
the world each year. In the United States, people in North Carolina know all
too well the effects of this liquid and solid waste. Hog production there has
increased faster than anywhere else in the nation, from 2 million hogs per year
in 1987 to 10 million hogs per year today. Those hogs produce more than 19
million tons of manure each year and most of it gets stored in lagoons, or
large uncovered containment pits. Many of those lagoons flooded and burst when
Hurricane Floyd swept through the region in 1999. Hundreds of acres of land and
miles of waterway were flooded with excrement, resulting in massive fish kills
and millions of dollars in cleanup costs. The lagoons' contents are also known
to leak out and seep into groundwater.

Some
of the same effects can now be seen in the Philippines. Not far from Teresa
Farms sits another, very different, farm that produces the most frequently
eaten meat product in the world. Foremost Farms is the largest piggery, or pig
farm, in all of Asia. An estimated 100,000 pigs are produced there every year.

High
walls surround Foremost and prevent people in the community from getting in or
seeing what goes on inside. What they do get a whiff of is the waste. Not only
do the neighbors smell the manure created by the 20,000 hogs kept at Foremost
or the 10,000 hogs kept at nearby Holly Farms, but their water supply has also
been polluted by it. In fact, they've named the river where many of them bathe
and get drinking water the River Stink. Apart from the stench, some residents
have complained of skin rashes, infections, and other health problems from the
water. And instead of keeping the water clean and installing effective waste
treatment, the farms are just digging deeper drinking wells and giving
residents free access to them. Many in the community are reluctant to complain
about the smell because they fear losing their water supply. Even the mayor of
Bulacan, the nearby village, has said "we give these farms leeway as much as
possible because they provide so much economically."

It
would be easy to assume that some exploitive foreign corporation owns Foremost,
but in fact the owner is Lucia Tan, a Filipino. Tan is not your average
Filipino, however, but the richest man in the Philippines. In addition to
Foremost Farms, he owns San Miguel beer and Philippine Airlines. Tan might be
increasing his personal wealth, but his farm and others like it are gradually
destroying traditional farming methods and threatening indigenous livestock
breeds in the Philippines. As a result, many small farmers can no longer afford
to produce hogs for sale or for their own consumption, which forces them to
become consumers of Tan's pork. Most of the nation's 11 million hogs are still
kept in back yards, but because of farms like Foremost, factory farming is
growing. Almost one-quarter of the breeding herd is now factory farmed. More
than 1 million pigs are raised in factory farms every year in Bulacan alone.

Chicken
farms in the Philippines are also becoming more intensive. The history of
intensive poultry production in the Philippines is not long. Forty years ago,
the nation's entire population was fed on native eggs and chickens produced by
family farmers. Now, most of those farmers are out of business. They have lost
not only their farms, but livestock diversity and a way of life as well.

The
loss of this way of life to the industrialized farm-to-abattoir system has made
the process more callous at every stage. Adopting factory farming methods works
to diminish farmers' concern for the welfare of their livestock. Chickens often
can't walk properly because they have been pumped full of growth-promoting
antibiotics to gain weight as quickly as possible. Pigs are confined to
gestation crates where they can't turn around. Cattle are crowded together in
feedlots that are seas of manure.

Most
of the chickens in the country are from imported breed stock and the native
Filipino chicken has practically disappeared because of viral diseases spread
by foreign breeds. Almost all of the hens farmed commercially for their eggs
are confined in wire battery cages that cram three or four hens together,
giving each bird an area less than the size of this page to stand on.

Unlike
laying hens, chickens raised for meat in the Philippines are not housed in
cages. But they're not pecking around in back yards, either. Over 90 percent of
the meat chickens raised in the Philippines live in long sheds that house
thousands of birds. At this time, most Filipino producers allow fowl to have
natural ventilation and lighting and some roaming room, but they are under
pressure to adopt more "modern" factory-farm standards to increase production.

The
problems of a system that produces a lot of animals in crowded and unsanitary
conditions can also be seen off the farm. The baranguay (neighborhood) of Tondo
in Manila is best known for the infamous "Smoky Mountain" garbage dump that
collapsed on scavengers in 2000, killing at least 200 people. But another
hazard also sits in the heart of Tondo. Surrounded by tin houses, stores, and
bars, the largest government-owned slaughtering facility in the country
processes more than 3,000 swine, cattle, and caraboa (water buffalo) per day,
all brought from farms just outside the city limits. The slaughterhouse does
have a waste treatment system where the blood and other waste is supposed to be
treated before it is released into the city's sewer system and nearby Manila
Bay. Unfortunately, that's not what's going on. Instead, what can't be cut up
and sold for human consumption is dumped into the sewer.

Some
60 men are employed at the plant. They stun, bludgeon, and slaughter animals by
hand and at a breakneck pace. They wear little protective gear as they slide
around on floors slippery with blood, which makes it hard to stun animals on
the first try, or sometimes even the second, or to butcher meat without
injuring themselves.

The
effects of producing meat this way also show up in rising cases of food-borne
illness, emerging animal diseases that can spread to humans, and in an
increasingly overweight Filipino population that doesn't remember where meat
comes from.

There
are few data on the incidence of food-borne illness in the Philippines or most
other developing nations, and even fewer about how much of it might be related
to eating unsafe meat. What food safety experts do know is that food-borne
illness is one of the most widespread health problems worldwide. And it could
be an astounding 300-350 times more frequent than reported, according to the
World Health Organization. Developing nations bear the greatest burden because
of the presence of a wide range of parasites, toxins, and biological hazards
and the lack of surveillance, prevention, and treatment measures-all of which
ensnarl the poor in a chronic cycle of infection. According to the FAO, the
trend toward increased commercialization and intensification of livestock
production is leading to a variety of food safety problems. Crowded, unsanitary
conditions and poor waste treatment in factory farms exacerbate the rapid
movement of animal diseases and food-borne infections. E. coli 0157:H7, for instance, is spread from animals to humans
when people eat food contaminated by manure. Animals raised in intensive
conditions often arrive at slaughterhouses covered in feces, thus increasing
the chance of contamination during slaughtering and processing.

Cecilia
Ambos is one of the meat inspectors at the Tondo slaughterhouse. Cecilia or
another inspector is required to be on site at all times, but she says she
rarely has to go to the killing floor. Inspections of carcasses only occur, she
said, if one of the workers alerts the inspector. That doesn't happen very
often, and not because the animals are all perfectly healthy. Consider that the
men employed at the plant are paid about $5 per day, which is less than half of
the cost of living-and are working as fast as they can to slaughter a thousand
animals per shift. It's unlikely that they have the time or the knowledge to
notice problems with the meat.

Since
the 1960s, farm-animal health in the United States has depended not on humane
farming practices but on the use of antibiotics. Many of the same drugs used to
treat human illnesses are also used in animal production, thus reducing the
arsenal of drugs available to fight food-borne illnesses and other health
problems. Because antibiotics are given to livestock to prevent disease from
spreading in crowded conditions and to increase growth, antibiotic resistance
has become a global threat. In the Philippines, chicken, egg, and hog producers
use antibiotics not because their birds or hogs are sick, but because drug
companies and agricultural extension agents have convinced them that these
antibiotics will ensure the health of their birds or pigs and increase their
weight.

Livestock
raised intensively can also spread diseases to humans. Outbreaks of avian flu
in Hong Kong during the past five years have led to massive culls of thousands
of chickens. When the disease jumped the species barrier for the first time in
1997, six of the eighteen people infected died. Avian flu spread to people
living in Hong Kong again this February, killing two. Dr. Gary Smith, of the
University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, also warns that "it
is not high densities [of animals] that matter, but the increased potential for
transmission between farms that we should be concerned about. The nature of the
farming nowadays is such that there is much more movement of animals between
farms than there used to be, and much more transport of associated materials
between farms taking place rapidly. The problem is that the livestock industry
is operating on a global, national, and county level." The foot-and-mouth
disease epidemic in the United Kingdom is a perfect example of how just a few
cows can spread a disease across an entire nation.

Modern Methods, Modern Policies?

The expansion of factory farming methods in the
Philippines is raising the probability that it will become another fast food
nation. Factory farms are supplying much of the pork and chicken preferred by
fast food restaurants there. American-style fast food was unknown in the
Philippines until the 1970s, when Jollibee, the Filipino version of McDonald's,
opened its doors. Now, thanks to fast food giants like McDonald's, Kentucky
Fried Chicken, Burger King, and others, the traditional diet of rice,
vegetables, and a little meat or fish is changing-and so are rates of heart
disease, diabetes, and stroke, which have risen to numbers similar to those in
the United States and other western nations.

The
Filipino government doesn't see factory farming as a threat. To the contrary,
many officials hope it will be a solution to their country's economic woes, and
they're making it easier for large farms to dominate livestock production. For
instance, the Department of Agriculture appears
to have turned a blind eye when many farms have violated environmental
and animal welfare regulations. The government has also encouraged big farms to
expand by giving them loans. But as the farms get bigger and produce more,
domestic prices for chicken and pork fall, forcing more farmers to scale up
their production methods. And because the Philippines (and many other nations)
are prevented by the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the WTO from
imposing tariffs on imported products, the Philippines is forced to allow
cheap, factory-farmed American pork and poultry into the country. These
products are then sold at lower prices than domestic meat.

Rafael
Mariano, a leader in the Peasant Movement for the Philippines (KMP), has not
turned away from the problems caused by factory farming in the Philippines. He
and the 800,000 farmers he works with believe that "factory farming is not
acceptable, we have our own farming." But farmers, he says, are told by big
agribusiness companies that their methods are old fashioned, and that to
compete in the global market they must forget what they have learned from
generations of farming. Rafael and KMP are working to promote traditional
methods of livestock production that benefit small farmers and increase local
food security. This means doing what farmers used to do: raising both crops and
animals. In mixed crop-livestock farms, animals and crops are parts of a
self-sustaining system. Some farmers in the Philippines raise hogs, chickens,
tilapia, and rice on the same farm. The manure from the hogs and chickens is
used to fertilize the algae in ponds needed for both tilapia and rice to grow.
These farms produce little waste, provide a variety of food for the farm, and
give farmers social security when prices for poultry, pork, and rice go down.

The
Philippines is not the only country at risk from the spread of factory farms.
Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa,
Taiwan, and Thailand are all seeing growth in industrial animal production. As
regulations controlling air and water pollution from such farms are
strengthened in one country, companies simply pack up and move to countries
with more lenient rules. Western European nations now have among the strongest
environmental regulations in the world; farmers can only apply manure during
certain times of the year and they must follow strict controls on how much
ammonia is released from their farms. As a result, a number of companies in the
Netherlands and Germany are moving their factory farms-but to the United
States, not to developing countries. According to a recent report in the Dayton
Daily News, cheap land and less restrictive environmental regulations in Ohio
are luring European livestock producers to the Midwest. There, dairies with
fewer than 700 cows are not required to obtain permits, which would regulate
how they control manure. But 700 cows can produce a lot of manure. In 2001,
five Dutch-owned dairies were cited by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency
for manure spills. "Until there are international regulations controlling waste
from factory farms," says William Weida, director of the Global Reaction Center
for the Environment/Spira Factory Farm project, "it is impossible to prevent
farms from moving to places with less regulation."

Mauricio
Rosales of FAO's Livestock, Environment, and Development Project also stresses
the need for siting farms where they will benefit both people and the
environment. "Zoning," he says, "is necessary to produce livestock in the most
economically viable places, but with the least impact." For instance, when
livestock live in urban or peri-urban areas, the potential for nutrient
imbalances is high. In rural areas, manure can be a valuable resource because
it contains nitrogen and phosphorous, which fertilize the soil. In cities,
however, manure is a toxic, polluting nuisance.

The
triumph of factory farming is not inevitable. In 2001, the World Bank released
a new livestock strategy which, in a surprising reversal of its previous
commitment to funding of large-scale livestock projects in developing nations,
said that as the livestock sector grows "there is a significant danger that the
poor are being crowded out, the environment eroded, and global food safety and
security threatened." It promised to use a "people-centered approach" to
livestock development projects that will reduce poverty, protect environmental
sustainability, ensure food security and welfare, and promote animal welfare.
This turnaround happened not because of pressure from environmental or animal
welfare activists, but because the large-scale, intensive animal production
methods the Bank once advocated are simply too costly. Past policies drove out
smallholders because economies of scale for large units do not internalize the
environmental costs of producing meat. The Bank's new strategy includes
integrating livestock-environment interactions into environmental impact
assessments, correcting regulatory distortions that favor large producers, and
promoting and developing markets for organic products. These measures are steps
in the right direction, but more needs to be done by lending agencies,
governments, non-governmental organizations, and individual consumers. Changing
the meat economy will require a rethinking of our relationship with livestock
and the price we're willing to pay for safe, sustainable, humanely-raised food.

Meat
is more than a dietary element, it's a symbol of wealth and prosperity.
Reversing the factory farm tide will require thinking about farming systems as
more than a source of economic wealth. Preserving prosperous family farms and
their landscapes, and raising healthy, humanely treated animals, should also be
viewed as a form of affluence.

Danielle
Nierenberg is a Staff Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute.